Academic Writing

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

by Marco Lazzari

Bill Tomlinson, Paul, Eric P. S. Baumer, Donald J. Patterson, Joseph Corneli, Martin Mahaux, Syavash Nobarany, Marco Lazzari, Birgit Penzenstadler, Andrew W. Torrance, David J. Callele, Gary M. Olson, Six Silberman, Marcus Ständer, Fabio Romancini Palamedi, Albert Ali Salah, Eric Morrill, Xavier Franch, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Rebecca W. Black, Marisa L. Cohn, Patrick C. Shih, Johanna Brewer, Nitesh Goyal, Pirjo Näkki, Jeff Huang, Nilufar Baghaei, Craig Saper
"Massively distributed authorship of academic papers"
Proceedings of Alt.Chi at the 30th ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2012), Austin, TX, USA, 2012

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques... more Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Emotion in scholarly discourse: denial, deconstruction, reinstatement

by Karen Bennett

In Fernanda Gil Costa & Igor Furão (eds.), Estética das Emoções. V.N.Famalicão: Edições Humus (2011) 271-282.

Since the 17th century, a battle has been raging between two distinct paradigms of knowledge in which the role of... more Since the 17th century, a battle has been raging between two distinct paradigms of knowledge in which the role of emotion has taken centre stage. With the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, all forms of subjectivity were effectively proscribed, a philosophical orientation that was reflected in the lexico-grammar of scholarly discourse. However, despite the increasing centrality of the scientific paradigm in the modern world, the older humanities tradition has continued to make its presence felt over the years, not least through the challenges to objectivity raised by poststructuralism. This paper traces the various phases of this battle in England and Continental Europe. It looks at how the humanities paradigm flourished in Catholic Europe long after Scholasticism and Rhetoric had been discredited in Protestant England, and focuses on various historical moments when the two paradigms came into conflict.

Academic Discourse in Portugal: A Whole Different Ballgame?

by Karen Bennett

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 9/1): 21-32. 2010.

Despite the existence of many contrastive studies that have drawn attention to academic discourse practices in other... more Despite the existence of many contrastive studies that have drawn attention to academic discourse practices in other cultures, the formal constitution of the discipline known as Contrastive Rhetoric may ultimately have served to reinforce the hegemony of English Academic Discourse (EAD). That is to say, by focusing upon the technical question of how to reduce L1 interference in learners' English texts, teachers and researchers are actively discouraged from considering the broader ideological issue of how knowledge is construed elsewhere.

Yet other ‘academic discourses’ do exist, sometimes so different from EAD in their structure and epistemological framework that they are scarcely recognisable as such to English-speaking practitioners. This paper presents the results of a survey of academic discourse in Portugal, in which a Corpus of 1,333,890 words (408 academic texts of different genres and disciplines) was analysed for the presence of particular discourse features not usually found in EAD. Results suggest that, in addition to a ‘modern’ style calqued upon the hegemonic discourse, there are also at least two other academic discourses regularly produced in Portugal today that are based upon an entirely different epistemology to the rational empirical paradigm underlying EAD.

Academic writing practices in Portugal: survey of Humanities and Social Science researchers

by Karen Bennett

Diacrítica — Série Ciências da Linguagem, 24 (1). 2010. 193-209

The world of academic research is becoming increasingly globalised, and as a result, Portuguese researchers are under... more The world of academic research is becoming increasingly globalised, and as a result, Portuguese researchers are under pressure not only to publish abroad but also to bring their discourse into line with Anglo-Saxon norms. This survey was designed to gauge the attitude of Portuguese researchers towards the hegemony of English Academic Discourse and find out something about their habits as regards the production of academic texts in English. 

Critical and Corpus Approaches to English Academic Text Revision: A Case Study of Articles by Portuguese Humanities Scholars

by Karen Bennett

Co-authored with John McKenny. English Text Construction, 2.2. 2009. 228-245

Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence... more Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese scholars through a process of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. If so, this would have important practical and ideological implications, not only for the academics concerned, but also for editors, revisers, teachers of EAP, translators, writers of academic style manuals and all the other gatekeepers of the globalized culture.
 The study involved a corpus of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose written by established Portuguese academics in the Humanities, which had been presented to a native speaker of English (professional translator and specialist in academic discourse) for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of superficial grammatical and spelling errors, the texts were made into a corpus, which was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and discourse markers (USAS) using WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003). The annotated corpus was then interrogated for the presence of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith 5 (Scott 1999), and the findings compared with those of a control corpus, Controlit, of published articles written by L1 academics in the same or comparable journals.
 The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a corresponding underuse of others, suggesting marked differences in the value attributed to those features by the two cultures.

Polishing Papers for Publication: Palimpsests or Procrustean Beds?

by Karen Bennett

Co-authored with John McKenny. In New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning, Ana Frankenburg-Garcia, Lynn Flowerdew & Guy Aston (Eds.), Continuum. 2010. 247-262.

This chapter is the result of a collaboration between a corpus linguist and a polisher or reviser of academic papers... more This chapter is the result of a collaboration between a corpus linguist and a polisher or reviser of academic papers written by established Portuguese academics. The aim was to examine the hypothesis that not only lexical and syntactic features, but also phraseological and discourse features of L1 may be transferred into the Portuguese researchers’ L2 writing, thereby undermining the “naturalness” of the writing and raising an (invisible?) obstacle to international publication. The corpus (Portac), which consisted of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose, was created from texts that had been presented to the language consultant for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of superficial grammatical and spelling errors, it was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and semantic field (USAS) using WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003), and interrogated for the presence of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1999). The findings were then compared with those of a control corpus (Controlit) of published articles written by L1 academics in a similar field. The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a corresponding underuse of others, suggesting a marked disparity in the value attributed to those features by the two cultures. This, it is suggested, may be due to differences in epistemological outlook, which raises issues of both a practical and an ideological nature for the language reviser.

English Academic Style Manuals: A Survey

by Karen Bennett

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(1),43-54, 2009

This paper presents the results of a survey of English Academic Style Manuals conducted between 2004 and 2007,... more This paper presents the results of a survey of English Academic Style Manuals conducted between 2004 and 2007, designed to establish whether English Academic Discourse is sufficiently well-defined as a concept to be useful for translation research. Although, with the current emphasis on genre and disciplinary differences, it is fashionable today to speak of Academic Discourses in the plural, the survey revealed a remarkable consensus as regards general principles, methods of textual construction, and the kinds of grammatical and lexical features to be used. This suggests the existence of a common framework underlying all EAD, thereby supporting the claim made by Systemic Functional linguists that there is an ‘essential continuity between humanities and science as far as interpreting the world is concerned’ (Martin, J.R. (1993). Technicality and abstraction: language for the creation of specialized texts. In M.A.K. Halliday & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing science: Literacy and discursive power. (pp. 203–220) Pittsburgh & London: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Critical Language Study and Translation: the Case of Academic Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, J.F. Duarte, A.A. Rosa & T. Seruya (Eds), Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. 111-127

This chapter uses Critical Discourse Analysis to show the very different ideologies encoded into Portuguese and... more This chapter uses Critical Discourse Analysis to show the very different ideologies encoded into Portuguese and English academic discourse, arguing that translation from one to the other is virtually impossible within the genre of the academic article.

Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Sonia Cunico & Jeremy Munday (eds.) Translation and Ideology, special issue of The Translator, Vol. 13, No. 2, Manchester, 2007. 151-169; reproduced in Translation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol. 3), Mona Baker (Ed.), Routledge, 2009. 151-169.

English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific... more English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, was initially a vehicle of liberation from the stifling feudal mindset. Spreading from the hard sciences to the social sciences and on to the humanities, it gradually became the prestige discourse of the Anglophone world, due no doubt to its associations with the power structures of modernity (technology, industry and capitalism); today, mastery of it is essential for anyone wishing to play a role on the international stage. The worldview that this discourse encodes is essentially positivist; it privileges the referential function of language at the expense of the interpersonal or textual and crystallizes the dynamic flux of experience into static, observable blocs, rendering the universe passive, inert and devoid of meaning. Despite its obvious limitations for dealing with a decentred, multi-faceted, post-modern reality, its hegemonic status in the world today is such that other knowledges are rendered invisible or are swallowed up in a process of 'epistemicide'. This paper examines this process from the point of view of the translator, one of the primary gatekeepers of western academic culture. Drawing on surveys carried out in 2002 of Portuguese academics working in the humanities, it attempts to discover just what happens to the very different worldview encoded in traditional Portuguese academic discourse during the process of translation, and goes on to discuss the political and social consequences of the ideological imperialism manifest in editorial decisions about what counts as 'knowledge' in today's world.

Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalization

by Karen Bennett

In Myriam Salaama-Carr (ed.) Social Semiotics, Vol. 17(2), 2007. 171-193.

Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific... more Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific Revolution, the moment when a whole new approach to knowledge began to take over the western world. Among the many repercussions of this great epistemological shift was the development of a new “transparent” type of discourse, felt to reflect reality more directly than the elaborate verbal edifices of the Scholastics. Today, the “authoritative plain style”, as Lawrence Venuti calls it, is so prevalent in English academic and factual writing that knowledge configured otherwise is rarely allowed past the cultural gatekeepers. There are countries, however, where, for historical and cultural reasons, the Scientific Revolution never really took place. In Spain and Portugal, for example, the anthropocentric paradigm favoured by the Christian humanist tradition has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and as a result many of the academic texts produced in these countries operate according to an entirely different philosophy of language. This paper discusses some of the linguistic and ideological problems of translating such scholarship into a form that is publishable in English.

The Scientific Revolution and its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Myriam Salaama-Carr & Maeve Olohan (eds), Science in Translation, special issue of The Translator, Vol. 17 (2). 2011. 189-210.

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about... more The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about profound changes on the level of discourse. Through a process of grammatical metaphorization (Halliday and Martin 1993), primary experience was linguistically reconstrued to create a picture of a static objective universe from which all subjectivity was effectively removed. The Catholic cultures of Continental Europe were initially resistant to the scientific worldview, remaining loyal for political and religious reasons to the earlier humanistic model (Bennett 2007a, 2007b). Nevertheless, by the late 20th century, with the pressures of globalization, most had developed a scientific discourse of their own, essentially calqued from the English model. The fact that this discourse was borrowed however, rather than resulting from an internal process of evolution, has led to certain grammatical and rhetorical inconsistencies, which raise problems for translation. This paper discusses some of the technical issues besetting the English translator of Portuguese scientific texts, including difficulties related to nominalizations, impersonal verb structures and the intrusion of features from the traditional discourse. It also considers ethical and epistemological questions resulting from the process of linguistic colonization (Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994).

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: The Geopolitics of Academic Plagiarism’

by Karen Bennett

In Thomas Rommel (ed.) Plagiate - Gefahr für die Wissenschaft? Berlin: Lit Verlag. 2011. 53-69

This chapter uses Tönnies’ notions of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to examine the issue of plagiarism from a... more This chapter uses Tönnies’ notions of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to examine the issue of plagiarism from a culturalist perspective. According to this, plagiarism is understood not as a universal or unequivocal evil, but as one component of a particular ethical system that took hold within a specific historical and social context, roughly contemporary with the European Enlightenment. Today, that ethical framework is so deeply entrenched in the power structures of the modern world that its values go largely unquestioned in countries at the centre of the world economic system. However, as we move away from the centre towards the periphery, we find that those values become weaker, and may enter into conflict with another moral code, which is usually more traditional in nature, though no less coherent. Indeed, in some parts of the world, it is those traditional values that actually hold sway in local universities, raising serious problems for academic mobility and the internationalization of knowledge. The very concept of plagiarism is also full of inherent contradictions, caused, at least in part, by historical tensions generated by the passage from one kind of society to the other. Vestiges of the Gemeinschaft continue to penetrate all aspects of modern university culture, ranging from teaching practices (the persistence of imitatio in academic writing courses) and hierarchical relations (the power balance inherent in the tutor/student dynamic) to the very philosophy of knowledge underlying modern science (where the rhetorical implications of the citation procedure sit uncomfortably alongside a metadiscourse of transcendental truth). Hence, this chapter argues that, in a context of increased globalization, there is a need for a deeper understanding of the various dynamics at work in this complex concept.

Review of 'Management Writing Out of Bounds: Writing after postcolonialism.' Alexander Styhre. Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, Malmö (2005).

by Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

Published (2007) in Scandinavian Journal of Management 23/2: 225-227
Unformatted copy
DOI: 10.1016/j.scaman.2007.02.002

Whatever the form of academic research, the results are almost invariably presented as a written text. Indeed, even... more Whatever the form of academic research, the results are almost invariably presented as a written text. Indeed, even when the means of presentation are non-traditional, the result can still be interpreted as text. Its creation can thus also be perceived as writing. There is no doubt that academic writing is a topic worthy of detailed discussion and, appropriately, it has received a fair amount of attention over the previous few decades. Alexander Styhre’s Management writing out of bounds, a recent contribution to that debate, couples the idea of multiplicity of possible academic writing styles and strategies to the notion of postcolonialism, i.e. the breakdown of the universalist claims of the Western civilization.

Greatest Evolvability: A Place of Chaos, White Rabbits, Fear, Receptivity and Invention

by Jason Wirtz

published in New Writing

Writing Courses Live and Die by the Quality of Peer Review

by Jason Wirtz

Chapter in Kathleen Hunzer's "Collaborative Learning and Writing"

Tracing the Images on the Ceiling: Reading as Invention

by Jason Wirtz

published in Writing on the Edge

The Critical Role of Journal Selection in Scholarly Publishing: A Search for Journal Options in Language-related Research Areas and Disciplines

by Hacer Hande Uysal

Technologie et pratiques bibliographiques en milieu universitaire

by Gerald Kembellec

Conceptual Development in Technical and Textbook Writing: A Challenge for L1 and L2 Student Readers

by Alan Jones

This article has been reproduced from:
Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference,
Limerick, Ireland, 12-15 July, 2005.
CD-ROM. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE (Catalog Number: 05CH37660C).

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The paper argues that the decoding skills that first year university students – both L1 and L2 students – bring to the... more The paper argues that the decoding skills that first year university students – both L1 and L2 students – bring to the kinds of technical writing typically found in textbooks or in academic articles are much more sophisticated than many available accounts suggest. Students need to, and do, ‘go beyond the text’ in a number of ways, and decoding is an inadequate term for the skills involved. Students frequently need to use prior knowledge of the field – including what Martin [33] calls its ‘technicality’i – to contextualise and explicate concepts found in their reading; so they need to obtain that knowledge and bring it to their reading. The obvious circularity of this condition is a key part of the problem, and solutions are suggested. Readers need to be able to handle higher order abstractions, and they need ‘forward inferencing’ skills to bridge the gap between what is said and what is going to be said, supplementing the backward looking processes of anaphoric reference and bridging inferences. These reading strategies reflect the dynamics of the writing process.

Evolving academic journal editorial systems

by John Adamson

co-authored with Theron Muller